财务会计专业外文翻译---变化中的会计师审计独立性-会计审计(编辑修改稿)

财务会计专业外文翻译---变化中的会计师审计独立性-会计审计(编辑修改稿)内容摘要：

easingly the general public has bee involved in stock ownership. The passage of the federal securities acts during the New Deal era, and the creation of the SEC, led to another transition in the concept of auditor independence. The SEC’s most important effect on auditor independence derived from its efforts to establish standards for financial reporting and auditing. Because of these efforts, public accountants and auditors no longer accepted that their primary responsibility was to a specific absentee owner, or to a collective proprietary interest, but rather to a set of professional standards established for the preparation and audit of financial statements. The concept of auditor independence shifted in favor of objectivity and neutrality in the reporting of the financial position and the results of operations, rather than loyalty to a particular party. This view was articulated academically and intellectually by Professor . Paton, who stressed the entity view of corporate financial reporting. The objective and neutral concept of auditor independence prevailed until the 1970s, when FASB was established as the authoritative independent accounting standards setter. From approximately that time, public accounting firms began to modify their objective and neutral focus and started advocating for their audit clients with regard to accounting and auditing matters. Simultaneously, the rapid growth of business enterprises on a worldwide basis provided large public accounting firms with an opportunity to bee the preferred providers of a wide spectrum of business services, the revenues from which quickly outpaced the fees from traditional auditing services. While the standards issued by the Auditing Standards Board (ASB) of the AICPA continued to stress independence from clients, the increasingly petitive marketplace for audit services, along with the plexity of international business practices, led some auditors to reduce their focus on objective and neutral interpretation of accounting standards in favor of being a trusted advisor for clients. Subsequent to the accounting and auditing scandals of the early 2020s, and the passage of the SarbanesOxley Act of 2020 (SOA), the idea of auditors as trusted advisors appears to have bee increasingly unsustainable. The parameters of a potentially new concept of auditor independence are still unfolding, but the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) seems to be stressing a concept of auditor independence that emphasizes a greater degree of separation between registered auditors and client management. Prior Debates About Auditor Independence The second half of the 20th century saw various debates in both the academic and the professional literatures about auditor independence. One argument pertaining to auditor independence developed from idealized views of professionalism that emerged historically in both the British and the American accounting professions. For example, Thomas A. Lee, in Company Auditing, 3rd ed. (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986, page 89), suggested the following: An honest auditor will behave like someone who is independent, using independence to mean an attitude of mind which does not allow the viewpoints and conclusions of its possessor to bee reliant on or subordinate to the influence and pressures of conflicting interests. Unfortunately, this admirable expression about auditor independence does not acknowledge that an auditor’s state of mind is not determinable, and, therefore, to conclude whether an auditor is independent pursuant to Lee’s definition is impossible. P. Moizier, in “Independence” (in Current Issues in Auditing, edited by M. Sherer and S. Turley, Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd., 1991), argued for an economic rationale for auditor independence, which was summarized as follows: There is an expectation that the auditor will have performed an audit that will have reduced the chances of a successful negligence lawsuit to a level acceptable to the auditor. In the language of economics, the auditor will perform audit work until the cost of undertaking more work is equal to the benefit the auditor derives in terms of the reduction in the risk of a successful lawsuit being possible. This then represents the minimum amount of work that the reader can expect the auditor to perform. However, all auditors are individuals with different attitudes to risk an。